plagiarismtest.org

A Taxonomy of Plagiarism and
Academic Fraudby Dr. Catherine Decker and Dr. Curt BurgessHyperlinks in this taxonomy last verified 6/7/03
Text copyright Decker and Burgess 2003

There are many ways to classify types of plagiarism. A quick search on
the Web in June of 2003 found fourteen different taxonomies of plagiarism;
these sites divided plagiarism into a range of subtypes numbering from
two to eleven (see all these sites on our students.html
page). Upon reflection, the following four categories seem to be the most
useful for distinguishing the major types of plagiarism.

1. Fraudulent Claims of Authorship

2. Fraudulent Claims of Originality

We might also add two other categories, perhaps more accurately called
academic fraud than plagiarism.

3. Fraudulent Claims about Non-existing
Scholarship(This is the creation of fake
quotations, authors, journals, publishers, interviews, data, statistics,
etc. When done for humorous purposes and not to mislead, such texts are
part of the minor genre of scholarship parody. Publications such as the
Journal of Polymorphous Perversity
and the Onion
are compilations of scholarship parody.)

4. Fraudulent Claims about Existing Scholarship(This is distorting, misreading, or making
false claims about actual scholarship written by other authors, including
inserting new words into the original text to change meaning--sometimes
called "Contextual
Fraud." This may also include the falsification of publication
dates or publication media to satisfy some set requirement of the assignment.
Another variation of this is the falsification of one's research findings
to support some predetermined position or theory. Such false interpretations
of data are usually motivated by the desire for fame and financial rewards.
Notoriously, during Hitler's reign in World War II, some research findings
were manipulated to support the "theory" of Aryan supremacy.
One variation of this is usually considered laudable, the article or work
that makes fraudulent claims about existing scholarship and/or fraudulent
claims in general to expose the poor, inadequate, politicized, and/or
biased review-and-acceptance procedure of a journal or publisher. The
famous example of this is the Alan
Sokal parody article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," originally published in Social
Text. Sokal's goal was actually to expose more than just Social
Text; he set out to expose the shoddy thinking and scholarship associated
with an entire school or type of scholarship--in Sokal's case, "postmodernism."

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The two major types of plagiarism can be further subdivided as noted
below.

1. Fraudulent Claims of Authorship

A.
Large-scale fraud: Claiming to have written a paper that was actually
written entirely or partially by another person or persons in the same
language or in another language.

i. Buying, trading, stealing, copying, or accepting
the writing of another and claiming authorship.
In addition to the change of authorship, other changes may be made,
such as the addition of a new introduction or section to meet the assignment's
requirements. The writing may also be revised to change documentation
styles, format, or tone. A rare variation of this may occur at the professional
level--one academic takes the work of a subordinate--usually a post-doc,
graduate student, or research assistant--and publishes the work as his
or her own without acknowledging the research and writing of the original
writer or greatly minimizing the work of said writing to mere "help"
or "advice."

ii. Translating the work of another writer and
claiming to be the author instead of simply stating one is the translator.
In art, reproducing the art of another artist (in the same or another
medium) and claiming to be the original artist, rather than a copier.
In the former case, the translation may even be done by translation
software which is not acknowledged, a further degree of fraud. Other modifications
in addition to the translation and authorship changes may be made to mask
this type of fraud, such as changes in documentation style or the false
attribution of some of the original sources to sources written or published
in English. In the realm of art, the supposedly "new" artist
may attempt to justify their appropriation of another's art as "postmodern
art" or "artistic licence." (The
Emerson College Policy on Plagiarism discusses this type of plagiarism
as badly done "artistic quoting"; for Emerson College, the culpability
of the artist depends on the intention of the "new" artist and
the degree of "familiarity" of the material appropriated.)

iii. Paying for or accepting the writing services
of another person who quantitatively and qualitatively revises the writing
but who is not acknowledged or made a co-author. Some people call
this "ghostwriting" (See Dr. Crawford of Fort Hays State University's
discussion
of plagiarism). Parents, friends, and/or tutors may be willing accomplices
in this type of plagiarism, mistakenly believing they can "permit"
their writing to be falsely represented as that of another. Unfortunately
on the professional level, this sort of ghostwriting is often sanctioned--authors
rely on their editors and sometimes paid ghostwriters for unattributed
writing (see Brian
Martin's "Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis"). Brian Martin
further notes that political speechwriters and comedic writing teams are
also types of professional ghostwriters whose writing is commonly not
acknowledged.

B. Mid-scale fraud: Claiming to have created
the ideas of another author or authors. Taking
any exact wording of another source--whether a unique term, a unique figure
of speech or metaphor, a sentence, or several paragraphs. Also stealing,
copying, or accepting another person's chart, table, illustration, graphics,
program, experiment, data, etc. and incorporating it into one's paper
as the work of oneself.

C. Small-scale fraud: Claiming the work
of one author is the partial or whole work of another author.This may be done accidentally or intentionally. The main motivations
for the intentional alteration of an author are avoiding a complex type
of documentation, avoiding the need to obtain a source that one has only
encountered indirectly, (sometimes called "secondary source plagiarism"--see
the Bensman's
reference in Brian Martin's "Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis")
or creating the illusion of having done a greater amount of research that
actually done or the illusion of using more prestigious, respectable,
and/or recent sources than actually used. When the writing of one real
author is attributed to a nonexistent author, the motivation is to hide
deliberate fraud. This seemingly illogical act is usually done to satisfy
a requirement to have a particular type of source material or a particular
number of sources. At the professional level, sometimes the work of one
person is falsely attributed to another in a sanctioned or complicit way--typically
this occurs in the form of coauthorship where no such collaboration has
occurred. The real author is not denied credit for his or her writing,
but the credit of writing or collaboration is extended to a person or
persons who have not contributed (at all, or less offensively, in any
extensive way) to the body of work. This type of false attribution is
what La Follette calls "honorary authorship" and what both Coser,
Kadushin, and Powell, as well as Fischer and Lazerson are referring to
when they discuss "managed texts" (both phrases are quoted from
Brian
Martin's "Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis"; none of these
three original texts cited by Martin have been consulted to construct
this reference). Brain Martin's discussion of these authors' work emphasizes
that these types of "institutional plagiarism" (Martin's term)
are designed to reward administrators or others with prestige or to sell
textbooks by using the names of more prestigious or established writers.

D. Smaller scale fraud: Inadequately framing
or documenting any source material that is quoted, summarized, or paraphrased
so that some of the source material is implied to be the original ideas
of the new author. In these cases, it is easy to prove inadequate
citation skills, but difficult to prove malicious intent. Accidentally
or deliberately, citations are done in an ambiguous or inadequate way
that implies greater intelligence and creativity by the new writer than
the reality of the situation.A common variation
of this is the "missing quotation mark"--accidentally or deliberately
the final quotation mark of a source is left off, so that it is unclear
if some sentences are the quoted author's ideas and words or the new author's
ideas and words.

E. Even smaller scale fraud: Claiming
to have created the wording, sentence structure, or organizational or
argumentative pattern used to convey the ideas of another source. Here
is where many students and even faculty or administrators, unfortunately,
sometimes disagree over the culpability of the author. Given the effort
taken by the "author" to have somewhat revised the original
material, some will excuse occasional thefts of exact words or even of
entire sentence structures. In these cases, students may simply be so
badly trained at paraphrasing or summarizing that they believe their inadequate
rewriting is original enough to be considered an acceptable paraphrase
or summary. Other students will attempt to excuse such fraud by claims
of poor-training, ignorance, or even miraculous coincidence--"we
just happened to write similar sentences or organize in similar ways."
More subtle is the theft of organization or argumentative patterns. Here
the same ideas are presented in the same order. The ideas may be common
knowledge while the wording is unique. What is stolen is the pattern of
the text--the order, the logic, the structure. When common knowledge is
involved, this has been called "Style plagiarism" (see C.
Barnbaum's "Plagiarism" at Valdosta State University). When
what is borrowed in an argumentative pattern, including the citing of
a series of secondary sources, this can be called "plagiarism of
the form of a source" (this phrase is quoted from Brian
Martin's "Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis"). Occasionally
students will claim that their thefts of wording; sentence structure;
or organization of ideas, material, and/or sources is legitimate because
the ideas of the original text are common knowledge or because the original
text is a public-domain document. This reasoning is fallacious because
unique wording, sentence structure, and organizational patterns must be
cited whatever the status of the information embodied in the wording,
structure, or pattern. The intention of the student, however, might not
have been to commit fraud, hence leading to ethical confusion. The role
of intention in determining guilt or innocence is not a ethical issue
that is easily agreed upon or resolved (consider for example the ethical
distinctions between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter).

2. Fraudulent Claims of Originality

This area is another about which there is some ethical confusion. Students,
faculty, and administrators may disagree about whether these cases constitute
"plagiarism" or "academic fraud."

A."Self-plagiarizing" or "recycling"
are common names for when students claim writing done for some other course
or purpose as original, distinctive new work. Some taxonomies of
plagiarism consider this a variation of "Ghostwriting" plagiarism--in
this case, the ghostwriter is the same person as the new author of the
"new" assignment (see Turnitin.com's
"Types of Plagiarism" subpage).The degree of revision of
the non-original work may vary from simply changing the title page information
to more substantive rewriting. The fraud, however, is that the student
is not doing--in whole or in part--new, original research and writing.
Although the author has written all the material, the material was not
written for the purpose of the assignment or was written to meet the requirements
of two or more assignments and to be turned in for multiple credit.

B. The writer contributes
no original thinking, writing, performing, or art whatsoever to the "new"
work. Every idea, chart, data, illustration, etc., has a source,
and the author has merely compiled or arranged the material into a whole.
The "new" paper adds nothing to the world's body of knowledge.
Often this is not considered plagiarism by teachers or administrators,
but simply (and usually equally fatal to an evaluative grade) a failure
to follow the directions of the assignment or grossly inadequate writing
that overquotes. The paper that is merely one string of quotes after another
with no substantial writing or thinking by the "author" is this
type of academic fraud. For a music assignment, this type of fraud involves
excessive "sampling" in which nothing but samples of other people's
music is used. Again, students, faculty, and administrators may disagree
on whether musical works consisting entirely of sampling constitute"fraud"
although they clearly involve little or no originality. Claiming to be
a "compiler," "editor," or "disc jockey"
seems more appropriate in these cases than claiming to be an "author,"
"writer," "artist," or "composer." Socially
sanctioned art forms that involve a minimum of creativity and are closely
related to this type of fraud are "found
poetry,""found
art," "collage,"
and "photomontage."
The documenting of sources and/or declaration that the author has merely
found and arranged the material, rather than created
the material, legitimizes this appropriation and distinguishes "art"
from "fraud." The perspective of different systems of ethics
(such as intention-based versus result-based ethical systems), however,
may influence our judgments of "originality." The important
factor in distinguishing fraud from legitimate art or scholarship (such
as the review
article or review
of the literature, the synthesis,
or the meta-analysis)
is both whether the previous produced material is presented honestly as
the work of others and if a degree of originality or novelty is actually
involved. In a good review
article, review
of the literature, synthesis,
or meta-analysis,
source material is primarily used to present some new material--typically
a new conclusion, interpretation, or evaluation of the older material.
These legitimate forms of scholarship do contribute new ideas while fraudulent
scholarship merely purports to contribute such new ideas but does not.
These legitimate forms of scholarship differ from patchwriting
because patchwriting does not attribute the "patches" to the
original authors